Wondering if anyone has any good books or other content to recommend on software design. I feel like when I start out on a new project I always get stuck in a rut of trying to design something good, then end up with an awful design anyways. On the other hand, I've been around professors and more experienced software engineers who seem to effortlessly come up with simple, powerful architectures and interfaces.

While I know that reading a book or two won't get me the experience I need to improve, it does seem like that might be a good jump-start. Anyone have any suggestions for me? Thanks!

Very similar to how the recipe book in the game "Potion Craft" is organized. I essentially want to be able to mark pages and assign an icon, letter, symbol, or whatever to the tab. Clicking the tab brings you to that page. I also want the freedom to arrange these tabs around the perimeter of the book.

I'm not even sure what search terms to use to find a software like this. I'm not looking for anything robust, just a simple reader app with minimal page marking with intuitive visual organization.

Does anything like this exist?

What have you been listening to this week? You don't need to do a 6000 word review if you don't want to, but please write something! If you've just picked up some music, please update on that as well, we'd love to see your hauls :)

Feel free to give recs or discuss anything about each others' listening habits.

You can make a chart if you use last.fm:

http://www.tapmusic.net/lastfm/

Remember that linking directly to your image will update with your future listening, make sure to reupload to somewhere like imgur if you'd like it to remain what you have at the time of posting.

As part of a weekly series, these topics are a place for users to casually discuss the things they did — or didn't do — during their week. Did you accomplish any goals? Suffer a failure? Do nothing at all? Tell us about it!

I'm into astronomy as a hobby, and it's useful to have a log of the things in the sky you've seen. Many people take handwritten notes, but my handwriting is awful and having to write notes takes away from enjoying the views through the telescope.

So after being inspired by AI note taking applications I've read about online, I decided to give it a try while out observing.

First, I take my recordings and run them through Whisper's speech to text engine. Because my recordings have frequent astronomical terms, it seems to be more useful to run the larger models (or the new turbo model), because they seem to do better identifying the names of moons and constellations.

Next, I run Ollama and give it a prompt like:

Here is a speech to text transcript of an observation session. Create a detailed log of the session, using only facts found in the text. Do not add your own interpretation to the text.

I'm still experimenting with prompts and models, but oddly it seems like shorter prompts give better results. So far, the type of model doesn't seem to matter so much as the number of parameters. Gemma2 27B outperforms llama 3.1 7B, but llama 70B outperforms both of them (again, I think the larger models have more context about which astronomical terms are important). Here's what that gets me with basically no work on my part:

**Observation Session Log**

**Session Details**

* Date: October 3rd, 2024
* Location: Wolf Street
* Telescope: Teleview 85 (also referred to as 80)
* Observer: [Not specified]

**Targets Observed**

1. M29 (Open Cluster in Cygnus)
	* Time: 2057 - 2101
	* Eyepiece used: 18.2mm
	* Notes:
		+ Found using star hopping from Sater
		+ Appears as a faint open cluster with 6-7 distinct stars
		+ Stars are fairly even in brightness and color
2. M39 (Open Cluster)
	* Time: 2109 - 2116
	* Eyepiece used: Ultra-wide angle, 18.2mm, and 8.5mm (noted as a mistake, actually
using 7mm)
	* Notes:
		+ Found using star hopping from Deneb
		+ Appears as a larger open cluster with more differentiation in star magnitudes
		+ Stars appear bluer than surrounding stars
3. Alberio (Double Star)
	* Time: 2120, 2155
	* Eyepiece used: Ultra-wide angle and 7mm
	* Notes:
		+ Found easily without a guide
		+ Appears as a beautiful contrast between colors with constituent parts standing out from the surrounding stars
4. M15 (Globular Cluster in Pegasus)
	* Time: 2120 - 2130
	* Eyepiece used: Ultra-wide angle, 18.2mm, 7mm, and Barlow (2x) with 7mm
	* Notes:
		+ Found using a bright naked-eye star as a guide
		+ Appears as a slight smudge or fuzzy patch with averted vision
		+ Not resolving individual stars at any power
5. Saturn
	* Time: 2140 - 2150
	* Eyepiece used: Low power, highest power (with a star chart to confirm moon positions)
	* Notes:
		+ Three moons visible: Rhea, Enceladus, and Titan
		+ Striping on the surface of Saturn visible at highest power

**Session End**

* Time: 2157

I'm very happy with the quality of the notes. It's much, much better than my handwritten notes and much less work, so I'm likely to do this more consistently.

Tildes is a very serious site, where we discuss very serious matters like politics, paypal and reddit. Tags culled from the highest voted topics from the last seven days, if anyone was befuddled.

But one of my favourite tags happens to be offbeat! Taking its original inspiration from Sir Nils Olav III, this thread is looking for any far-fetched offbeat stories lurking in the newspapers. It may not deserve its own post, but it deserves a wider audience!

I've been thinking about keeping a diary to improve my English because I rarely use it, but I don't know what to write about... So, if you keep a diary, what do you write in it? And what do you use/prefer, app or paper?

What have you been doing lately for your own fitness? Try out any new programs or exercises? Have any questions for others about your training? Want to vent about poor behavior in the gym? Started a new diet or have a new recipe you want to share? Anything else health and wellness related?

When I was in elementary school, I found some Advanced Dungeons & Dragons books at a yardsale. I read through them, brought them to school, and played through a basic campaign with some friends. Since then, I haven't met anyone interested in pen-and-paper RPGs. I still hope that I can one day convince someone to play with me, but I don't even know which system I should try to learn. There are now so many different editions of D&D, in addition to countless alternatives and endless arguments over the merits of each.

Whatever system I decide to learn, I will need to invest time and energy into learning and teaching the game to others, and I'll most likely be the DM, so I'd like to choose one that won't be too difficult for beginners to get into. While I enjoy exploring interesting game mechanics, I think the idea of creating an interactive adventure story or a world to explore with friends is what attracts me the most. The Fate system sounded interesting, but I had a hard time understanding the core rulebook. I've recently read short summaries of several other systems that seem like they could be fun and not too hard to get into, such as Index Card RPG, Shadowdark, Tiny Dungeon, Five Torches Deep, Fantasy AGE, and Creative Card Chaos; but I can't afford to read through each of them and seven editions of D&D to determine which one is most suitable for me.

Does anyone have any advice on how to evaluate my options or a suggestion for a good one to start out with?

I bought an M2 Macbook Air at the start of this year for uni. I only planned to use it for uni work as I have another 'more powerful' laptop that I use for everything else, but I kinda love the M2 and want to make it my daily driver laptop. Battery lasts for ages, screen is great, it's thin and light, etc. The problem is - as you might guess - I only got the 512GB model and if there's one thing Apple hates, it's people having control over their hardware, so no expandable storage. I can't afford to upgrade the entire laptop, so I need to work with what I have. Here's what I want to use it for:

• Graphic design: Adobe software, high-res images, typefaces, etc.
• Music production: Ableton Live 11 Suite, sample packs, plug-ins, project folders, etc.
• Music library: uncompressed .m4a files because iTunes hates Vorbis 😢, ~80% of my library (I don't have everything downloaded yet) is 25GB.
• Web-browsing: Firefox... this one isn't really relevant but I feel like I should include it for completeness.

Does anyone have any tips to stretch this 512GB as faaaaaar as it can go? I have a 2TB external SSD, but I'm wary of keeping anything important on it because it's small and I don't want to accidentally lose a bunch of stuff. I can spend a bit of money (maybe 30usd) if anyone has a good idea that requires buying something, but I can't spend any ludicrous amounts, I already did that to get the laptop!